The Future of Business Operations is here - The Digital OneOffice™

Monthly Archives: Jun 2019

BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) grew up because of all the exceptions enterprises have to process that were not able to be absorbed into the standard ERP software. Yes, we found people equipped to do this work at lower wages housed by efficiently run service providers. And that work we couldn’t initially send to the BPO providers we just found manual workarounds to get it done until we eventually found an outsourcer who would find a model to take on that work for you.

However, just as many enterprises were running out of places to find (yet) more and more hidden costs they could quickly remedy through (yet) more outsourcing, along came their perfect new toy to unearth costs they had never thought possible to eliminate: RPA.

Yes, folks, this stuff is just the thing to keep you occupied for the next few years to keep your greedy CFOs at bay - and even includes the word "robot" to conjure up images of human work

Blue Prism yesterday announced the acquisition of Thoughtonomy, a SaaS-based integrated automation platform with Blue Prism RPA baked into its core. After six years and much flirting with potential suitors, Terry Walby’s Thoughtonomy successfully exits into the welcoming arms of Blue Prism. This was always the logical end-game for Terry's business, which he bootstrapped from day 1 and tirelessly pushed at the automation world. HFS was particularly inspired with the firm's work at the UK's National Health Service (NHS) (which you can read here).

Essentially Thoughtonomy is RPA + cognitive capabilities + cloud. Net-net, Blue Prism is buying a cloud (SaaS) wrapper for its own product; arguably, it could have (and should have) built that itself, but decided instead to pay a tidy sum. However, this cloud wrapper puts Blue Prism in the ring with Automation Anywhere's V12 cloud product, which is drawing a lot of plaudits from enterprise users (our forthcoming Robotic Transformation Software Top Ten will reveal its performance across several hundred enterprises). More importantly, it increases Blue Prism’s attractiveness as an acquisition target itself by upgrading its cloud-readiness from “available cloud reference architecture” to a legitimate SaaS-based offering. We touted Blue Prism as a potential target for IBM three years ago, and with a scalable cloud story and IBM/s major pivot around Cloud with its RedHat acquisition, surely this Cloud-ifying of Blue Prism makes the firm even more attractive to them.

Finding the synergies to justify the price tag – cloud with a potential side of cognitive capabilities, but the focus is too UK centric

Now, Blue Prism can contend with Automation Anywhere’s claim that “BotFarm is the first and only enterprise-grade platform for scaling bots on demand”. The midmarket can benefit from Blue Prism’s RPA technology, with very little setup cost or initial investment. Mid size companies that considered automation out of their reach can enjoy the democratizing effects of cloud, avoiding the hassle of on prem infrastructure.

The shopping basket also contains Thoughtonomy’s gross assets, reported at 31 May 2018 as £5.6m and established relationships with Thoughtonomy’s big-name clients including NHS, AEGON, and Sony. Partner implementation and reseller arrangements are in place across many of the usual suspects in SI and consultancy such as Computacenter (from where Terry Walby moved to IPsoft before setting up Thoughtonomy).

Like Blue Prism, Thoughtonomy is UK based so there’s not much by way of additional footprint synergies to be realized. Blue Prism, therefore, will only be adding a limited new channel and will have to rely on its existing sales and delivery channel to make this acquisition pay off. The US market is where the bulk of new demand for automation solutions is surfacing, and Thoughtonomy isn't adding to Blue Prism's US team, which is under huge

Just when you thought this little analyst firm wouldn't dare add another rock star brain into our "Triple A" coverage (analytics, automation and AI) we've gone and done it again, adding Miriam Deasy to our global analyst team (based in UK) to cover integrated automation and AI platforms, alongside the likes of Elena Christopher, Reetika Fleming, Tapati Bandopadhyay, Melissa O'Brien, Saurabh Gupta, Ollie O'Donoghue and myself. Miriam has develop a career across the world of technology and services with roles at EDS (HP) and Amdocs back in the day, before taking out time to raise two boys and a girl William (12), Kayleigh (10) and Darragh (9) before making her move to the analyst world with IT and telecoms firm Ovum three years' ago.

We all remember when Jack Nicklaus played his last Masters, and when Sir Alex Ferguson managed his last game for Manchester United. These guys were godfathers of their trades, not unlike Azim Premji has been for IT services, the man who oversaw a firm which diversified from diapers and vegetable oil into one of the largest IT services firms in the world. However, when they retired, they left a legacy that enabled many to follow in their footsteps (albeit noone has come close yet). Premji's legacy, which forever is written into the annals of IT services folklore, is still unfinished, which may be a good thing for his successors... there is still a lot of work to do to get Wipro to the place Premji always envisaged.

The current market situation facing Wipro's leadership

To recap, Wipro’s Executive Chairman, Managing Director and philanthropic champion Azim Premji is retiring by end July. His son and Wipro’s Chief Strategy Officer, Rishad Premji will

When you have to listen to literally hundreds of people a day spouting advice about reskilling, unlearning, change management, relearning etc., I am going to respond with “great, so what are you doing yourself to stay ahead of today’s digital environment and increase your value as a superstar worker?” You may love to pontificate constantly weird definitions of digital transformation on twitter and harp on about today's digital talent needs, but do you truly practice what you preach?

Is it just me, or have we entered an environment where everyone loves totalkabout change, but most aren't actually doinganything (themselves) about it?

I mean, if your accountant hadn’t bothered to brush up on the latest tax changes, or your personal trainer didn’t know how to use a Fitbit, you probably would seek to replace those relationships in your life. So what gives IT professionals the right not to learn Python, or learn how to deploy data management / automation tools? And what gives business executives the right not to learn how to use non-code analytics tools to help their decision-making, or social media products to help them communicate in the market? And operations executives the right not to learn low-code automation and AI apps that can help them free up people-hours on work that adds no strategic value to the business? And who told sales and marketing executives it was fine to ignore really learning the products / services they were selling because all they had to do was to follow a set of pre-defined processes to do their job effectively?

Why have so many of us become so complacent?

It just seems that the majority of workers today just think they need to learn to follow a few processes and that’s all they need to do to command a tasty salary and remain employed for years and years…. so few people actually realize that the whole nature of people value is changing for enterprises – they just love to do things the same old way they have always done them, and simply cannot be expected to learning anything new. "We just don't have the talent in-house to do that" is the constant whine we hear from enterprises; and "our IT managers are project managers, not consultants" is what we hear from service providers. Then why don't you train them? Is our agonized response. Why does everything have to stay paralyzed in this constant vacuum of sameness?

Much depends on the approach our enterprises take to driving change

The biggest problem with enterprise operations today is the simple fact that most firms still run most of their processes exactly the same way as they did decades years ago, with the only “innovation” being models like offshore outsourcing and shared service centers, cloud and digital technologies enabling those same processes to be conducted steadily faster and cheaper. However, fundamental changes have not been made to intrinsic business processes – most companies still operate with their major functions such as procurement, customer service, marketing, finance, HR and supply chain operating in individual silos, with IT operating as a non-strategic vehicle to maintain the status quo and keep the lights on.

As our Hyperconnected journey illustrates, many industries have now reached a place where they have maximized all their delivery methods for getting processes executed as efficiently and cheaply as possible. They have tackled the early phases of digital impact by embracing interactive technologies to help them respond to their customer needs as those needs occur, whether electronic or voice.

In short, most enterprises have been able to keep pace with each other without actually changing the underlying logic of processes. Simply doing things the same old way has been enough for many, until a competitor comes along with an entirely unique way of servicing your